MS Business Intelligence: An Option for SAP Users?

The implementation of business intelligence solutions at SAP user companies has kept me busy for over ten years now. In the last year in particular, a massive interest has arisen among these companies for comprehensive Microsoft business intelligence solutions.

I've seen this kind of over-the-SAP-top looking in this user group a few times in the past. The first wave I know of came with MIS ALEA (now Infor PM10), which brought the first truly "simple" business intelligence solution to the broad market. Other waves followed with Qliktec and most recently Tableau.

The boom of the MS SQL Server (Analysis Server) in the last decade, however, does not change the fact that the fame and thus the actual comprehensive use arise from the perception of portal and frontend, and there it looked thin at Microsoft until a few years ago. Admittedly, SharePoint and Excel have been around for what feels like forever, and at some point in between there were also the Performance Point Services - well.
Meanwhile, the assortment of business intelligence front-ends and portals in the Microsoft Store has become much more pleasing. For the most common application classes portal, dashboard, reporting and analysis, I have attempted a mapping of MS' own products in the form of a graphic.

I make no claim to the correctness or completeness of the representation. The potential use can be made much more complicated at will.

Before I turn to the topic of potential Microsoft Business Intelligence at SAP companies, a brief subjective inventory of the use of SAP's own BI tools within user companies.

The question of (non-)use of third-party products has an almost religious character in some companies.

In my experience, SAP user companies can be roughly divided into three groups in terms of their business intelligence strategy.

• The purist SAP enthusiasts who do not want to and will not stain their installation with any third-party software.
• At the other end of the spectrum are the user companies that are thoroughly fed up with their SAP ERP solution, the SAP refuseniks who shun further expansion (e.g., with SAP BI components) like the devil shuns holy water.
• In between is the largest group, the pragmatists. I estimate the distribution among the groups from my gut like the classic Gaussian bell curve.

Based on this, I see three main strategies among SAP users with regard to future business intelligence architectures:

• The pure SAP strategy from database to frontend and portal for all application classes and users.
• The mixed strategy: SAP is used for enterprise-wide application classes. Third-party providers (such as Microsoft) are selected or used in the medium term, especially for departmental solutions and non-enterprise-wide application classes.
• The reengineering strategy: Here, existing (SAP, Oracle, etc.) business intelligence enterprise architectures are put to the test on a massive scale, with a high probability of being compared with Microsoft enterprise architectures.

In the second and third strategies, Microsoft now has really good cards beyond the use of the pure SQL database. The current hype around Power BI reminds me of the Qliktec enthusiasm mentioned above, which prevailed until a few years ago.

The outsourcing of large parts of the BI functions from Excel to Power BI, the consolidation of data extraction and modeling (in Power Query) into a new common tool for reporting and dashboarding, which enables on-premise, mobile and cloud operation at the same time, is currently being well received by users and interested parties alike.

There are certainly business intelligence vendors that provide better solutions than Microsoft and SAP combined, but decision-makers at large companies (and SAP customers are in the front row) still have an affinity for large vendors with comprehensive solution portfolios.

Now that Microsoft has masterfully fulfilled these two criteria, we can expect an exciting development in this market segment in the next few years.